Sudden and dramatic climate change: dust and ash blocked out the sun; temperatures dropped like a stone and kept on dropping thanks to the impact’s location; the blast generated incredible heat; it vaporised the rock and blasted tons of sulphur dioxide into the air; it mixed with water in the atmosphere to form sulphuric acid droplets: and that was a disaster. ibid.
Carbon dioxide choked the planet. Temperatures increased by around 20 degrees Celsius over the next hundred years. It was global warming on a fast track. ibid.
It was the meek – the burrowers and the scavengers – who inherited the Earth. ibid.
Our earliest ancestors were rescued from extinction by global warming. Man on Earth with Tony Robinson: Triumph of the Homo Sapiens, Discovery 2009
Man’s 200,000 year battle with the climate. ibid.
160,000 years ago some of the first modern humans ... roamed this area in north-eastern Ethiopia. ibid.
Just how close to extinction Homo sapiens came has recently become shockingly clear. ibid.
The incredible diversity that there was among hominids before homo sapiens finally won the day. ibid.
During its history the climate has fluctuated wildly. ibid.
The social brain: the ability of groups of humans to form contacts and cooperate with each other. ibid.
Neanderthals: they’d evolved down a different branch of the human family tree. ibid.
One pocket remained in Gibraltar. ibid.
Neanderthals lacked the social brain of their human cousins. ibid.
Climate changed our destiny. Man on Earth with Tony Robinson II: Birth of Civilisation
Global warming triggered a revolutionary way of living: farming. ibid.
How did global warming cause the Mediterranean to smash through the Bosphorus Sill? ... The Ice Dam was melting, and around 8,400 years ago it finally gave way. ibid.
How the Maya reacted to a devastating drought. Man on Earth with Tony Robinson III: Killer Climate
The Maya were extraordinary; they built vast and ornately decorated stone cities without metal tools. They mapped the heavens and measured time. They had a sophisticated system of writing, a rich culture, and a history that stretched back thousands of years. ibid.
The Maya, their rulers and the gods had effectively entered into a three-way deal. ibid.
Abandoned by the gods and failed by their leaders the Mayan people revolted. ibid.
The Northern Hemisphere was hit by the little ice age. And on the south coast of Greenland two very different societies found themselves in the firing line. ibid.
The Norse settlers were livestock farmers. ibid.
The Inuit and the Norse living side by side but poles apart. ibid.
We call it the Little Ice Age ... Cold enough to freeze the River Thames in London. ibid.
The high plains of south-west America. There 750 years ago the inhabitants of North America’s first cities were hit by a savage drought. ibid.
As the threat of global warming makes our future ever more uncertain I’m looking into the past because we humans have been here before. Man on Earth with Tony Robinson IV: The Modern World
Just how much humans have achieved in only four hundred generations. ibid.
A savage drought is beginning to grip large parts of the Peruvian highlands. ibid.
We call it the Little Ice Age and it delivered two brutal blows to the inhabitants of medieval Europe ... The great famine ... The Black Death was one of the worst pandemics in history; it began not in Europe but in Asia as a direct consequence of the impact of climate change on rodents. ibid.
The Black Death wiped out between a third and two-thirds of the entire population of Europe. In England alone, more than two million people are thought to have died of it. ibid.
I was taught that the human brain was the crowning glory of evolution so far, but I think it’s a very poor scheme for survival. Kurt Vonnegut
Why is this important? It’s probably the most important question there is. What does it mean to be a human being? What is our future? Are there other creatures like us? What have they become? What can evolution produce? How far can it go? Dr Frank Drake, founder SETI, interview Dallas Campbell ‘The Search for Life: The Drake Equation’
By taking evolution further and becoming a robot species. Aliens – The Definitive Guide, Discovery Science 2013
Highly advanced humans living thousands of years ago. Unidentified DNA in the human genome. And ancient chronicles describing heavenly interventions on Earth. Did humans really evolve from apes or is our intelligence the result of other-worldly design? Ancient Aliens s3e16: Aliens and the Creation of Man, History 2011
2004: researchers at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at the University of Chicago published the results of a study that claims the sophistication of the human brain was the result of a so-called Special Event. ibid.
Might various versions of hominids have been the result of experiments at creating intelligent life on Earth? ibid.
The genetic lineage of every living person could be traced back to a single woman who once lived in Africa. ibid.
No power in the universe can hope to stop the force of evolution. Star Trek: The Next Generation s1e14: Angel One, Riker to boss lady
What we are seeing is the raw material of evolution. Random mutations that every now and then give a subtle change that may, or may not, give an advantage to future generations. By looking at these sequence changes in related eucalyptus species we are finding that some spelling variants are shared, while each new species also has its own unique spelling variants. Thousands of scientists working on many other plant and animal species see the exact same trend. These findings are perfectly in step with modern evolutionary theory (not read hypothesis). Without an understanding of the principles of evolution, my work would be a meaningless pile of data screaming out for an explanation. Dr Simon Southerton, board post 16th March 2009 ‘Why I Think Evolution is a Fact’
You think man can destroy the planet? What intoxicating vanity. Let me tell you about our planet. Earth is four-and-a-half-billion-years-old. There's been life on it for nearly that long, 3.8 billion years. Bacteria first; later the first multicellular life, then the first complex creatures in the sea, on the land. Then finally the great sweeping ages of animals, the amphibians, the dinosaurs, at last the mammals, each one enduring millions on millions of years, great dynasties of creatures rising, flourishing, dying away – all this against a background of continuous and violent upheaval. Mountain ranges thrust up, eroded away, cometary impacts, volcano eruptions, oceans rising and falling, whole continents moving, an endless, constant, violent change, colliding, buckling to make mountains over millions of years. Earth has survived everything in its time. It will certainly survive us. If all the nuclear weapons in the world went off at once and all the plants, all the animals died and the earth was sizzling hot for a hundred thousand years, life would survive, somewhere: under the soil, frozen in Arctic ice. Sooner or later, when the planet was no longer inhospitable, life would spread again. The evolutionary process would begin again. It might take a few billion years for life to regain its present variety. Michael Crichton, Jurassic Park
If one small and odd lineage of fishes had not evolved fins capable of bearing weight on land (though evolved for different reasons in lakes and seas,) terrestrial vertebrates would never have arisen. If a large extra-terrestrial object – the ultimate random bolt from the blue – had not triggered the extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago, mammals would still be small creatures, confined to the nooks and crannies of a dinosaur’s world, and incapable of evolving the larger size that brains big enough for self-consciousness require. If a small and tenuous population of proto-humans had not survived a hundred slings and arrows of outrageous fortune (and potential extinction) on the savannas of Africa, then homo sapiens would never have emerged to spread throughout the globe. We are glorious accidents of an unpredictable process with no drive to complexity, not the expected results of evolutionary principles that yearn to produce a creature capable of understanding the mode of its own necessary construction. Stephen Jay Gould
Charles Darwin was a natural history scientist. Great Scientists: Charles Darwin, 2004
He put together the most extraordinary and comprehensive collection of diverse specimens. ibid.
He became a sickly reserved recluse. ibid.
He concluded the finches must all be derived from a common ancestor. ibid.
The more fit an animal is to survive the more likely it will be to reproduce. ibid.
A mechanism for how species developed on Earth. ibid.
Charles Darwin transformed for ever the way we think about life. ibid.